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Mark.JUK writes "Scientists working under an EU funded (3 Million Euros) project out of Bangor University in Wales (United Kingdom) have developed a commercially-exploitable way of boosting broadband speeds over end-user fibre optic lines by using Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OOFDM) technology, which splits a laser down to multiple different optical frequencies (each of which can be used to carry data), and low-cost off-the-shelf components. The scientists claim that their solution has the ability to 'increase broadband transmission by up to two thousand times the current speed and capacity' (most UK Fibre-to-the-Home or similar services currently offer less than 100 Megabits per second) and it can do this alongside a 'significant reduction in electrical power consumption.'"

It's not incompetence in this instance; It is actually malice. BT would much rather hold on to this tech for the next 15 years, squeezing an extra few pounds per month out of you for the next tier of service, right up until you're paying more for your internet connection than you are for your mortgage.

Consider; The identical fibre with this new tech is all of a sudden 2000x times less efficient than it could be. Do you think you'll be charged 1/2000 of the current rate if it's implemented and you elect not to use it?

(I realise there is more to this, like switching overhead, backbone speed, contention etc).

It's not a perfect market though because one company (British Telecom) inherited all the copper wiring joining people's homes to the network even though it was originally publicly funded through the Post Office before BT existed as a commercial company. Now they charge you a line rental even if you use a different ISP (as if they could rent that specific piece of wire to anyone else). Some areas of the UK are cabled up and you can avoid this nonsense but I was recently informed that my flat (=apartment) could not access cable despite the fact it's on a main road in West London. The cost of physically drilling through concrete and laying cables is way way beyond the budget of small ISPs so you're stuck piggybacking on BT lines.

Now they charge you a line rental even if you use a different ISP (as if they could rent that specific piece of wire to anyone else).

This part I don't actually object to - they're still on the hook for fixing the wire if it breaks, which could cost them hundreds, even thousands. Plus there's provisioning of electricity for boosters and such.

Of course, with the talk of 100mbit and up services I can't help but wonder if at that point whether the switches themselves would be the bigger chokepoint.

Technically they're Openreach's lines, Openreach was created by Ofcom so BT would be separated from the lines in the same way that other providers are. When I was working there we were working with the in house software to cripple it so BT didn't have better access to the hardware than other providers and the job was relatively well done. BT still had some advantages in that you could still just walk down the corridor and speak to whoever was in the exchange but for the majority of people who dealt with cus

Not if you have a monopoly or a de facto monopoly shared with only a handful of large competitors who all share a mutual interest of making massive profits. Then you pass the savings to customers very slowly, reluctantly giving in bit by bit in tiny incremental improvements. By the time you've passed along the full savings you've already made additional advances that garnered you 10 fold more savings than what you've passed on.

It all comes from the counter-productive mantra that it isn't good enough to main

Would you really be that interested in a 1000x increase in last mile speed, even if it meant that NONE of your actual applications (except maybe bittorrent) were going to go any faster at all? I would rather see them invest in the backbone than trying to out-do a 100mbit last mile which is probably pretty freaking hard to saturate as it is.

Ah, but no-one in Britain has a 100Mbit/s connection. I'm on 1Mbit/s, and there are many on worse connections than that here. We definitely need a drastic improvement in the last mile, and it needs to be properly future-proof otherwise it would be a mostly wasted initiative. 1Gbit/s and above, fibre to the premises.

Two customers of the same ISP could transfer files at ridiculous speeds. Bittorrent and other P2P services would automatically take advantage of this, upon seeing one peer with insane bandwidth. The technically inclined would make good use of this, storing backups off-site once ample last-mile bandwidth is there.

Edge-network caching services like Akami would now mean many popular websites will be super-fast, not just slightly lower latency...

Well, maybe. But I saw a documentary on when McDonald's started super sizing meals (no, not "Supersize me") and when you first had the store, staff, equipment, procurement, cleaning etc. delivering extra fries actually cost them very little. I imagine it's quite the same for an ISP, to take my own as an example for 22% more in cost I get 140% more bandwidth compared to the tier below mine. So if delivering super fast broadband is dirt cheap they'll want to push me to another crazy fast tier for money I didn

I don't know if things are better in the UK, but here in the US the bottleneck for fiber-to-end-user is rarely the link from CO to end-user.
The bottleneck is aggregate traffic capacity from CO to the backbones, an amount that has to be shared among all users.
Giving individual end users more capacity to the CO sounds like it would make the current bottleneck even more apparent.

TFA is pretty useless and doesn't indicate what sorts of fiber this works on, or why it is different from other OOFDM-related work; but is there any reason to suspect that a technology that improves fiber transmit rates wouldn't help the CO backbone link speed as well?

Given the, um, vigorous state of competition in the broadband market, it isn't clear that that will matter much; but if they have some new secret sauce that makes transmissions over fiber faster it would, naively, seem to be something that co

TFA is pretty useless and doesn't indicate what sorts of fiber this works on, or why it is different from other OOFDM-related work; but is there any reason to suspect that a technology that improves fiber transmit rates wouldn't help the CO backbone link speed as well?

Given the, um, vigorous state of competition in the broadband market, it isn't clear that that will matter much; but if they have some new secret sauce that makes transmissions over fiber faster it would, naively, seem to be something that could be added to any part of the network carried over fiber.

Maybe it won't because tossing in a router that is capable of processing 1000x more packets is NOT going to happen with "COTS" parts? Fiber is only as fast as the hardware on either end. These are little strands of glass barely wide enough to feel, if doubling/tripling/1000x'ing bandwidth were as simple as tossing a few more in the trench don't you think they would have done that already? Gracefully processing the light at either end is the hard part.

It would certainly help if the tale I was spun about my slow broadband was true. According to the droid I spoke to. there was no point in installing more equipment into my local exchange because they were bandwidth limited on the link from that relatively local exchange to the main backbone, and it would mean laying new fibre, which would take a long time and be very expensive. If they can suddenly speed up that link by 10x, let alone 2000x, then the cluster of villages served by that exchange will, in an i

Well, it means they can charge you the same for using less fiber and power.

So what they'll do is all new laid fiber to the endpoint will use this technology, inorder to save money, charge you the same, but they'll leave their 100kbps backbone, so that they can claim it's the pirates clogging the pipes.

Thanks for the input, get your point but was really just saying what others have subsequently done better - the theoretical speeds of 'broadband' are already often far in excess of the speed that you can actually download at.

No no no thats just WDM for DWDM. Imagine a piece of glass fiber with prisms on each end and separate red, green, blue, etc lasers and detectors. They (can) operate completely independently. You can do the same thing with RF and NTSC signals... its call old fashioned analog cable TV.

OOFDM is like hyper close packed DWDM and usually made out of different tech. Some games are played to eliminate ISI and crosstalk, assuming the gear is working properly, perfectly linear, etc. Maybe a cruddy analogy would be kinda like two voice signals in one DSB carrier, or another cruddy analogy is its plain ole DSL FDM except coordinated so the FDM slices don't/can't interfere with each other and the leading O means its optical.

For RF this is "old" stuff like from the 90s. For optical this is pretty impressive and new. Same concept just a couple orders of magnitude higher frequency.

HA HA yeah maybe thats in the grant proposal as a goal, or its low cost compared to installing another length of fiber... Its not gonna be low cost as in I could do it in my basement using parts from an old laser printer, or you'll be buying a fiber "ethernet switch" using it for $9.95. It is probably going to be lower-cost compared to any previous design, which IS cool.

I suspect they are actually doing some kind of fiddling in the electrical domain and calling it FDM, while the laser is still either On Off Keying or maybe Phase Shift Keying. Since DP-QPSK transmitters and receivers still cost about as much as a luxury car they're hardly COTS.

Well, at least I can pronounce the place name;-) but of course we impose such limita..........tions on packet lengths that saying something out loud - or using carrier pidgeon (al.........beit with a broken leg after that message;-) ) might be more reliable

Right, so by your logic, all internet connections run at exactly the same speed, since light travels at a constant speed in the same medium.. When someone says that a 1Gb/s connection is "a thousand times faster" than a 1Mb/s connection, they're simply wrong.

Makes you wonder what the point of so-called broadband is, doesn't it? We might as well have stuck with our 14.4 kbps modems.

Well, I tried to put it together from a couple of fragments, but I read "Syr, yr hyn a ddywedwch" as "Sir, you're being a douche" almost verbatim... so maybe it's then followed with "... but are probably correct".

It's not often I get told what for in a language I don't know, so I'm a little rusty and not quite the cunning linguist I used to be.;-)

First of all, here in the Netherlands the roll-out of fiber to the home seems to be moving at a snail's pace. My impression is that our local telco giant, KPN, who work together with Reggefiber to install fiber optic cabling, is only interested in doing this for new neighborhoods. I once asked what it might take to change their minds and was told that, if I was to survey my neighborhood (around 1,000 homes) and gather signatures from at least 40% who would be interested in such a connection, then they woul